Some Notes on the History of Diking and Drainage of Herring River and other Wellfleet Bay Tidal Marshes: 1763-1935

Source: Wellfleet Annual Town Reports unless otherwise noted.

J.W. Portnoy

October 2009

Estuarine Management during the 1800s

Most of Wellfleet’s bayside tidal marshes remained unrestricted through the late 1800s. Even the railway, constructed about 1870, employed bridges rather than solid-fill dikes to pass over tidal creeks. The harvest of natural resources from estuaries like the Herring River was a major economic and social focus of the town, as indicated by the consistent attention given to the management of the herring run (including both alewives and blue-back herring) in Annual Town Reports. For example, the Treasurer’s Report of 1883 included a “Brook Account” listing all wages associated with operation of the run. A “Fishery Station”, where herring were trapped and netted, was staffed daily throughout the spring run. And an Annual Town Meeting vote (1896) was required to move the “Fishery Station from its present location (perhaps the vicinity of High Toss Road) to the Bridge at the southeast end of Bound Brook Island (most probably where modern Bound Brook Island Road crosses the river).”

This herring run was substantial, with over 200,000 fish harvested between 1888 and 1890, the only years for which total catch was reported. Belding (1920) noted that Wellfleet’s Herring River run was the second most productive in the state between 1890 and 1899.

Beginning apparently in 1791, the right to fish for herring was auctioned off each spring by the selectmen, their authority derived from a vote taken at each Annual Town Meeting. In addition, each Wellfleet citizen was permitted to take 200 fish per year, at a cost of ½ cent each. The town’s annual receipt from the auction, ranging between $409 and $667 in the late 1880s and documented in each Annual Report, increased greatly through most of the next decade (Figure 1). At this time proceeds from the sale of the fishing rights were enough to pay all elected town officials.

Motivated apparently by the success of the run and auction, the town voted to extend the herring spawning area in the headwater kettle ponds by constructing a “Gull Pond Canal” connecting Gull and Higgins Ponds in 1903 at a cost of $569. [Note, however, that Belding (1920) reported that the connection between these two ponds was dug in 1893; moreover, recent paleo-limnological work by Winkler and Sanford (1994), who analyzed zooplankton remains in Gull Pond sediments, indicated that these two ponds had been connected, likely by Indians, hundreds of years earlier.]


Early 1900s: Wetland alterations begin

Probably prompted by a year, or successive years, of abundant rain and nuisance mosquitoes, proposals for mosquito suppression appear first in the 1904 Annual Report, with a request for $1000 “to drain and dyke meadows and use oil where needed to stop the mosquito pest”. Additionally in 1905 an article was passed requiring the owners of “salt and fresh meadows to cut ditches” and connect them to main creeks; landowners who failed to comply would be charged for ditching undertaken or contracted by the town.

Also in 1905, Town Meeting voted to “appoint a committee and petition the Legislature to build a dyke (sic) across Herring River”.

Interestingly, the Annual Town Meeting of February 1906 broke with tradition and voted to leave the “gate of Herring Brook open and not sell the fishing of the Brook”. This may have been in anticipation of imminent dike construction and concern for its effects on herring migration. However, the following month a Special Town Meeting reconsidered and reversed this vote. There is no explanation of either action in the Annual Report, but one might suspect public ambivalence about disturbing a traditional and still productive fishery.

In 1907 the town voted $10,000 to dike the Herring River, provided that the state match that amount of funding. Town Meeting voted again not to sell the fishing rights, and this time the vote was not rescinded.

Over the next two years Town Meeting voted to dike off several other estuaries within the Wellfleet Bay system: at Powers Inlet (now Powers Landing) and Duck Harbor in 1908, and Mayo Beach, Mayo Creek, “Pine Field in South Wellfleet”(could this be the 20-acre Thimas Bog, a diked salt marsh?) and Indian Neck in 1909. Again, the primary objective was the suppression of mosquito breeding. [Changes at the Mayo Creek crossing were also motivated by road maintenance costs: the bridge was replaced by a cheaper solid-fill dike and culvert.] The 1909 actions included increasing the height and width of both Powers Inlet and Duck Harbor dikes. It should be noted that by this time sediment deposition had probably filled these basins to a point where navigation was difficult for all but the smallest vessels, so maritime interest had much diminished.

Diking’s effects on financial and natural resources, and mosquitoes

Although significant amounts of money were spent by Wellfleet on ditch drainage for mosquito suppression shortly before the diking; these expenditures increased greatly after the supposed mosquito-control dikes were already in place (Figure 1). Suppression included ditching and stream “cleaning” (channelization), as well as the application of oil (kerosene) to smother and poison aquatic immature mosquitoes. Through the 1910s and 1920s annual expenditures for mosquito control regularly exceeded $1000 (over $24,000 in modern currency). Between the diking of Herring River in 1909 and 1935, when mosquito control began to shift from the town to the state, albeit at continuing town expense, Wellfleet had spent over $31,000 (over $500,000 in 2009 dollars) on ditching and oiling diked wetlands. This expense was in addition to the cost of constructing and maintaining the many dikes built in town since 1910.

The wording of many subsequent Annual and Special Town Meeting appropriations for the drainage of diked marshes suggests that the predicted outcome of blocking the tides, i.e. fewer mosquitoes, was not being realized. A typical example is Article 17 of the Annual Town Meeting of 1910, the year after the River was diked:

“To see what action the Town will take towards raising and appropriating a sum of money for the purpose of establishing proper outlets for the water in the different sections of the Meadow lands, which are affected by the Herring River Dike…”(emphasis mine).

Although the effect of the dikes in impounding water, reducing tidal flushing and thereby favoring floodwater mosquito breeding seems apparent to local officials by this time, they and Town Meeting chose to continue with tidal restrictions and ditch drainage, rather than to restore natural tidal flushing.

Figure 1 clearly shows the collapse in the herring fishery after the diking of Herring River (note that Belding (1920) attributed this collapse to the one-year lease system), but other natural resources of economic value were lost. In 1913, Town Meeting appointed a committee to arbitrate the case of damage done to Levi Higgins’s meadow, caused by the Herring River Dike; this man was apparently harvesting salt hay that, with the blockage of sea water, would have succumbed to the invasion of freshwater wetland plants. On another occasion, and as late as 1927, Annual Town Meeting voted that “land damages on Herring River Meadows be left in the hand of the Selectmen for adjustment”, presumably financial compensation for continuing damage to salt hay crops.

Literature cited

Belding, David . 1920. A Report upon the alewife fisheries of Massachusetts. Division of Fisheries and Game Department of Conservation. Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Whitman & Howard. 1906. Proposal to build the Herring River Dike. (not exact title)

Winkler, M.G. & P. Sanford. 1994. Development of the Gull Pond chain of lakes and the Herring River basin, Cape Cod National Seashore. Report to National Park Service.


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